We performed another PractiTest upgrade this weekend, and we’re happy to announce that we are starting to support Exploratory Testing sessions with the help of some cool new functionality:

You can create an empty test and start running it without steps, meaning that you can create your Exploratory Testing Charters based on a description of what you want to achieve with your test.

We added the ability to Add, Delete or Modify your Steps during the run of the test; so that as you progress through your Exploratory Session you can record the stuff you tested and keep the log for future reference.

At the end, you can update the original Test with the new / updated steps, so you can reference it or reuse it in the future.

In addition to the stuff above we also added features requested by users:

We modified and drastically enlarged our Custom Memo Fields.

After setting the run-step status to ‘Passed’ the focus on the page ‘jumps’ directly to the following step so that you don’t need to constantly scroll down.

We added the ability to see more than 20 lines in the Test and Issue grids, so that you can see more or all your data more comfortably:

We stumbled upon a report from Microsoft saying that Small & Medium Businesses using hosted services and solutions perform better financially than those using in-house software. You can check their press release here.

To summarize their findings, the study performed by a third party research firm showed that companies using SaaS and Cloud Based products, such as PractiTest :), showed higher revenues than those using traditional in-house solutions. The research also pointed at the fact that both awareness as well as the migration of SMBs towards SaaS solutions is growing year after year.

Michael Korbacher, a director in Microsoft, said that “Using pay-as-you-go cloud technologies, small and midsize businesses can now afford and easily have access to enterprise-class, secure services across any platform.”

The study also quotes Dale Vile, research director of Freedom Dynamics saying that “This whole picture corroborates the notion that technology and hosted services can provide tangible business advantage, even for smaller companies, and it – not surprising to see that investment in IT and hosting goes hand in hand with good financial performance.”

So what we always knew that makes perfect sense now gets a formal approval: SaaS solutions such as PractiTest are good for SMBs since they allow them to get the best possible products at accessible costs, and not only taking into account the price of the licenses but also the overall cost of installing and maintaining these solution in-house.

As always it came with many small fixes and improvements, but it also included 2 major improvements that were high in our users’ wish list:

Reports Module

Improvements to the Test Batch operations

Reports Module

Even though it is still in Beta, we’re very happy launch the Reports module in this version.
What you see today is only a subset of the reports we’ll be having in the future, but we believe it already provides some great value.

The heart of the module, the Report Center, is where you create your reports and where you can see all the previous reports generated for your project:

In this first release you can create reports based on 3 templates: Tabular, Traceability and Detailed report; and you can use these templates for each of the PractiTest entities (Issues, Tests and Requirements).

This is how the new reports definition window looks like:

We will be happy to get your feedback as well as ideas for the additional features you like to see within this module. Please provide share with us your comments on our Feedback Forum.

Batch Edit & Batch Clone on the Tests Module

There are some features in the system that we know people use all the time, for example the batch edit and batch clone features within the Tests Module.

Still, until today, this feature had a small problem, there was no easy way to set a field to empty once it was already filled with data. So on 95% of the cases this was enough, but we decided to go the extra mile and make this feature right 100% of the time.

We updated the edit/clone form in a way that let’s you decide what fields you want to modify by first selecting the checkbox next to the field name (if you want to leave this field “as is” just leave it unchecked). If you want to set a field to “empty”, simply select to modify and choose the empty option (of the drop down, or un-select the checkbox for example).

We are already busy working on the next batch of features to be updated shortly.
So see you in our next update with more cool features!

During the few weeks we concentrated a lot in our back-end server infrastructure, resulting in today’s upgrade with few functional additions, but bug fixes and back-end related stuff.

These are the two small features that we did add to this release:

A specific permission type related to the Custom Views, which means, if you’re not the owner / author of the view, and don’t have this permission (by default Administrators only), then you cannot change other’s views. You can change your own views though.

‘Account Settings’, available only to Account owners, near the ‘settings’ link. The Account Settings shows to the Account owners how many projects there are under their account, the users’ license information, and the keys for using our API.

Our latest updated comes to answer some of the “small-feature” requests we’ve been getting from the field these last number of weeks. We decided to make it a small one, so that it would allow us to continue developing the cool new functionality that will be available shortly (teaser – it rhymes with passports…)

This update comes with the following additions:

New filter criteria to display entities based on whether one of more of their fields are “empty” or “not-empty”. A simple change to make a world of difference.

When a test has been cloned from a previews test, the system will also allow you to see the attachments of the original test(s) and not only those of the current one.

PractiTest now remembers the status of the Folder Tree in the Test & Execution module, and it will not expand it whenever you enter the view.

And many small fixes and improvements related to working with large number of views and folders, cloning operations, filtering with dates, etc.

We started the New Year full of energy, and we continue working hard to implement the important things our users ask for.

So, even though last week we delivered a set of cool testing features, we decided not to wait any longer and release a new PractiTest version this weekend with some additional things that were ready to be released (we don’t believe in letting our users wait needlessly)

SVN integration. Covering the end-to-end development process by linking between the Issues handled in PractiTest and the changes to the code base itself. Click to learn more about our svn-integration.

Links between issues, great for multiple cases such as duplicate bugs, related tasks, etc.

Template tests flag, to create a specific type of tests that is not to be run but serves as a template to create test suits and views. To activate this flag go to the Settings > Project Fields tab.

Statistics for numeric fields in the Test & Execution module. Useful for things like calculating the estimated effort to run a set of tests, or the mean time it took to execute tests.

And other changes and fixes.

In addition to stuff above, we also did some cosmetic changes to the GUI of PractiTest to re-organize the screen and provide more working space on the screen (something that is always on high-demand). As part of this changes we took out the settings tab and placed it as a link on the top right of the screen, just in case you were wondering where that tab had gone…

We invite you to continue sharing with us your feature requests and wishes. The best way to do this is by going to PractiTest’s Users Forum and adding or voting for the things you’d like to see in the Platform.